Mother Teresa wrote, “It is not how much we do, but how much love we put in the action that we do.” We can reflect over the past year of our many Blessings and what we learned and tried to do. Our many topics that we worked on was Homelessness, Palliative Care and Mental Health. I would like to touch on a few points on these subjects.
The first one is putting care into the Mental Health Care. A CBC Radio program stated that the North Bay Regional Health Care Centre has peer support workers helping patients in crisis. When they come to the emergency room, the support workers help during the down time between assessment and admission. They help to keep the person calm, and makes the patient feels that they have a supportive person on their side.
The support workers are experienced in education and their own experience. They help provide strategies for coping with day to day struggles with mental health issues. The support workers let them know that they are not alone, and they can help.
The nurses think the peer support workers are invaluable. To learn more about peer support workers, you can go to https://www.cbc.ca/radio/whitecoat/music-is-medicine-1.4669040 and hear Dr. Brian Goldman.
On January 30, Bell Canada had Bell Let’s Talk Day. It is about having the right tools to combat the stigma around mental health issues. Bell will donate 5 cents for every application text, call, tweet, social media toward Mental Health.
Palliative Care
There was a qualitative study on the level principles and practices to support spiritual care at the end of life. There are six principles that influence the organization of spiritual care.
- Quality spiritual care incorporates the spiritual into every other aspect of hospice palliative care.
- More profoundly then in any other area of care, quality spiritual care is guided and directed by the dying person and the family.
- Hospice palliative care is fundamentally a vocation, and the work is inherently spiritual.
Principals that enable a high-quality approach to spiritual care by care providers:
- Quality spiritual care requires care providers to allow spiritual questions and issues to emerge.
- Spiritual care is also an act of “witnessing.” Principles that enable the spiritual care practices of care providers:
- Spiritual care includes rituals and times dedicated to marking transitions and processing experiences.
Quality spiritual care emphasizes that the role of volunteers, whose presence and work reinforces and ensures that hospice palliative care is grounded as vocational and spiritual.
Education and Health
Joanne Palmer